


Underneath the clothing (it itches still)

by Darklin (Makioka)



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: M/M, Masturbation, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-09
Updated: 2012-03-09
Packaged: 2017-11-01 16:20:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/358859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Makioka/pseuds/Darklin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Reporter chips in with his own thoughts. "I reckon he'd have it down his shoulder-blade. Some quote from Hemingway is my educated guess,” </i> In which Nate and his (possible) tattoo is a source of unending fascination to Brad Colbert.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Underneath the clothing (it itches still)

**Author's Note:**

> Contains canon-appropriate language. Sadly without a beta. 
> 
> Inspired by this prompt http://gk-hardcore.livejournal.com/3547.html?thread=17115#t17115

It's something of a joke at first, a game they play. Spot the LT's tattoo. It's Ray's reasoning, or what passes for reasoning in a fucked up mind running on whatever shit he's been swallowing like it's candy this week. He'd regaled them all with his theory, Reporter staring wide-eyed and fascinated, not sure whether to believe or take it with a pinch of salt. Man's starting to learn not take Ray at face value.

Brad has to admit it's some pretty convincing shit though. Ray is as close as he ever gets to earnest. "Stands to reason dude," he shouts. "LT is one of them college graduates, all they ever do is get wasted and get stupid tats. Not unlike my man here," and he takes his eyes off the road to grin a shitfuck grin at Brad. "I mean you ain't no college boy, but I figure classy family like yours, it's an easy way to rebel without going so far as painting your nails black. I mean it's just one step beneath doing some dumb shit like joining the marines."

"Fuck you," Brad replies amiably. "And LT doesn't have a tattoo. We'd know by now." The minute he says it, he knows how wrong it sounds, like he's been looking on those rare occasions when the LT is anything but fully dressed, but he keeps his face cool, and even the sister-fucking retard that Ray is doesn't get into it there and then, though he slants Brad a look, taking his eyes off the road for one long second, until Brad isn't sure which is worse, crashing into a berm or having Ray say one fucking thing about Brad checking out the LT's undoubtedly fine ass.

By the grace of Ripped Fuel, Ray says nothing, but goes right back to speculating on what it could be. "It'd be fucking hidden dude. The LT ain't no shit for brains asshole, even drunk on the pussy wine-coolers he undoubtedly drinks with his liberal cunt friends, he wouldn't get something he couldn't hide." It's sound, the sort of thing a Recon Marine would think, if he thought at all about what sort of ink his commanding officer was likely to have.

The rest of the Humvee pipes up with suggestions now. Trombley suggests Nate's feet, citing a girlfriend of his who had a dolphin tattooed there, but gets shouted down by the rest. Apparently Nate might have a gay-ass tattoo or so the reasoning goes, but there's a limit as to how gay it could possibly be. Ray leers at Brad, and gives him a filthy wink. "Maybe he's got a matching one with his favourite team-leader. A pretty little tramp stamp." That surprises Reporter into a laugh, because if there are two words you couldn't describe Brad's tattoo with, it's pretty or little, and the idea of Nate Fick having a tramp stamp is nearly as ludicrous. 

"No way it could be as pretty as mine," Brad replies easily, but his mind has caught hold of the idea of Nate Fick and his elusive tattoo now, and there's something about it that makes the hairs on his arms prickle despite the heat, and he doesn't want to think why, not with Ray and his sharp eyes and his complete lack of a brain-mouth filter sitting a foot away. 

Reporter chips in with his own thoughts. "I reckon he'd have it down his shoulder-blade. Some quote from Hemingway is my educated guess,” a suggestion that held evident merit, though with the proviso that most of them have seen the LT with his shirt off at some point and never noticed it. Poke points out that it could’ve faded, and that none of them have really thought about looking for a tattoo on the LT before. 

It’s a topic rife with possibility, and one apparently everyone has strong opinions on, even Walt who is the first to start the pool. “I bet a ranger grave dig and two jalapeno-cheeses, that LT has a tattoo on his back of some Shakespearean quote,” and with a bet like that thrown down in front of them, they have to join in. Brad stakes his claim on the thigh with ‘who dares wins,’ knowing as he did so that there wasn’t a chance in hell he was right. When everyone had picked their choices, the game began in earnest. The tattoo-spotting starts from then, word of honour is all that is needed, full description necessary. 

 

Brad can’t get the thought out of his head, and he can’t explain what has him so jumpy over it. The LT probably didn’t even have a tattoo, however hard he pictured it he couldn’t imagine Nate Fick, no matter how young and drunk, lying back and letting some fuck tattoo him. The image was all wrong in his head, and he tried not to think about it, because the last thing he needed was to be imagining all the places where Nate Fick could have ink. Apparently Brad’s mind was as undisciplined as the Iraqi army though because it kept slipping back into speculation that night, no matter how hard he reined it in.

The next few days were a living nightmare, whenever the LT walked past, Trombley, or Hasser or Ray were there to jog his arm, and mutter theories and speculations, ranging from ludicrous suggestions of an arrow through a heart, to Ray’s lewd idea of a ruler on his cock. Brad kept his eyes firmly off the LT, refusing to stoke the fire with fuel, though he could feel the LT looking at him with puzzlement. They weren’t exactly close in the traditional way, the invisible gulf between their relative positions rendered that impossible, but as far as the LT could be friendly with anyone, he was friendly with Brad, and as much as Brad could reciprocate without it being inappropriate he did, which put together gave them the bones of a rapport. This in turn made his step back from any contact or engagement noticeable; if only to the LT. 

He did his best to reassure the LT without words, that it wasn’t personal, backing him to the hilt not only in briefings, but outside them as well, but avoiding the night walks that had led to accidental meetings, or engaging him outside of their professional interactions. He didn’t trust himself to tear his eyes off his officer, and stop speculating on exactly where the stark, sharp lines of his hypothetical tattoo began, and where they ended. He was almost afraid that if he looked him straight in the eyes, the other man couldn’t help but see exactly what he was thinking. 

Eventually the game died down, and Brad could look at the LT again with some sense of normality, and the tension that had begun to grow between them died down, the LT seemingly accepting that Brad had got over whatever his problem was. Which didn’t mean it was dealt with, because while he didn’t stay up nights thinking about tracing over patterns on the LT’s ribs, or at least not as much, it reminded him of how much he’d missed even their casual contact, the ability to know what the LT was thinking, the sense of reassurance that emanated from him, even when there was none that could be given.

He rather thought the LT had missed it as well, he occasionally looked up to find thoughtful eyes on him, and he was never swift in looking away, as though by looking at Brad he was making a point, though not an easily understood one. If the others noticed, they kept silent about it though, the situation was precarious enough with command as it was, and the idea of fucking up the one person who was trying to keep them operational just wasn’t going to happen. 

Until Ray poked him in the ribs, and pointed out a shirtless Fick, and the obvious lack of any tats. Brad didn’t give a fuck what Ray could see, because even at the distance he was at, one thing was clear to his hyper-focused eyes, and that was the tendril of ink that could just be seen on one hip, dipping below the waistband, and obscured again almost immediately by an absentminded hitch of the pants, and the sickening, shocking flood of lust that suffused him, almost drowning him in its intensity. 

It was compounded only moments later, when Ray finally cracked, and claiming they’d had enough time to find out themselves, asked the LT if he had any tattoos, and the LT without batting an eyelid replied in the negative. 

If the thought of the LT’s potential tattoo had been distraction enough, the knowledge that the LT had inked skin under his pants was impossible to resist, and Brad didn’t even want to try. That night lying back in his grave, he stared at the stars unseeingly, mind focused on that one glimpse, dark against pale skin, only the merest bit, impossible to tell what the whole thing was. He was hard without thought, uncomfortably so merely at the thought of Fick and his secret. He’d bet his MREs for the next week, that nobody in the platoon knew at all. He was too far gone for this to end in anything but a combat jack, but for once he’d planned for this exigency, just far away enough from everyone else for this to work if he kept quiet, grave dug just a little deeper to help. 

Getting the MOPP suit off was a struggle in itself, but the relief when his hand finally met his aching dick was unparalled. It’d been too long in the first place, and now with the image of Nate Fick clearly before his eyes, he bit his lip and squeezed tightly to stop himself from coming that instant like some inbred country teen faced with his first goat to fuck. 

In his mind’s eye, the LT’s hips were smooth and as pale as the rest of him, and the dark shadowy ink ran down from just below his hipbone, to the top of his inner thigh. His mind didn’t bother filling in the details of the tattoo itself, but in his imagination he nuzzled against the soft skin, as though he could taste the detailing, closing his eyes as though he could sense it through touch and taste alone. He felt his hand speed up at the thought of just kneeling there, face pressed into skin, hands holding hips, the weight of Nate’s dick between them. The thought of salt-sweaty skin was so strong, he could almost taste it, and his dick was beginning to hurt from the pressure exerted on it. With a few final desperate strokes he came, holding back even the ragged breaths that fought to escape him, feeling the sweat soak into yet another layer.

He blinked, his eyes feeling hazy as he looked back up at the stars, and thought about what had just happened. He’d just jerked off to the thought of his LT, his straight commanding officer, fantasized about licking his goddamn tattoo, and came from little more than that. He waited a minute or two for some disgust to kick in, but there was nothing but the mild afterglow of an overdue orgasm, and he filed it under things he really didn’t want to think about just yet. 

The problem was, one combat jack wasn’t doing jack shit for his problem, and with all the shit going down with Encino Man and command’s hard-on for fucking the LT and by extension the platoon over, he couldn’t afford to fade out like he had last time. The LT needed his support, needed their support and he couldn’t get that if Brad couldn’t even look him in the eyes. So it was time to square it away, if he had to think about this unfortunate turn of events then it had to be at night only, and nowhere near the LT. 

It wasn’t easy, but he wasn’t called the Iceman for nothing, and if the LT looked at him a little longer than usual sometimes, that wasn’t Brad’s fault. He kept his eyes strictly off the LT’s hips, and the LT’s mouth, and his mind as much out of the gutter as he could, and that was what he could manage. If it wasn’t good enough, he was pretty sure LT would find some way to tell him. It had dismayed him at first, that this ridiculous obsession showed no signs of withering and dying, but in the clusterfuck that was Iraq it was the least of their problems. Time enough when the bullets stopped flying, to figure out what the hell it meant, whether it was Nate Fick driving him out of his mind, or just the ink.

He’d just about concluded over a number of weeks that it was a lethal combination of both, Nate Fick and his obscene mouth, and unexpected quiet air of command that made Brad want to sink to his knees sometimes and rest, that combined with the quiescent rebellion under his clothes, the sprawling unregulated ink staining his skin, that he pretended wasn’t there, like he pretended to ignore Brad when Brad pointed out the monumental fuck-up that was Captain America. It was all the LT after all, and this wasn’t an obsession that was fading, not when the LT looked back and Brad saw Nate.

It was pitch black, the next time they got to talk alone, the stars mostly obscured, the camp dimmed down, the men shifting restlessly on a twenty five percent watch that let most of them sleep. Brad didn’t follow the LT, just seemed to know where he would be, which direction he headed in as a preference, as though long weeks of following every move had paid off. They’d chatted before recently like this, about innocuous things, or as innocuous as it got on a battlefield, discussing Trombley, touching on Encino Man before Nate hurried them on, but something felt different tonight, and Brad was always one to press his chance. He’d done his recon, as any good recon marine should, now was the time to make General Mathis proud by launching a full scale attack. 

‘When’d you get the ink?” he asked casually, and pretended not to notice the miniscule start of surprise. He’d been right then. The LT had thought his tattoo was a secret, hardly unusual to assume in a military situation where they hadn’t had a shower in months. 

For a moment he thought the LT wouldn’t answer, then the reply came. “A month before deployment.” There were no further details given, if Brad wanted to know he was going to have to dig. The silence was not uncomfortable but it was expectant, as though Nate was waiting for something in return.

Brad leaned back and looked up. “When I got my back tattoo done,” he began.

“Your tramp stamp Sergeant, give everything its proper name,” came the reply, and even if he couldn’t see the smirk, he could hear it and a smile twitched at his own lips.

“When I got mine done,” he began again, “I went in with three sketches done by a friend, and came out hours later with the outline done. I got it coloured separately, a bit at a time, like a present to myself. I didn’t do it for much of a reason apart from the obvious. I know men who got theirs, so they could be more easily identified if they went down, or who wanted something to remind them of what they left behind.” He looked into the blackness, but couldn’t see Nate. His quiet breathing could still be heard though. “I got mine because no-one else has it. Person would say no-one else would want it, but that’s beside the point.”

Nate’s voice was quiet and firm in the darkness. “I walked in and got it right there and then. Standard font, my own words, a little bit of embellishment. I wasn’t drunk, I wasn’t with friends. I went in there and had it done, because I wanted to mark my own existence on my body. Any scars I get out here, will be from soldiers on either side trying to do their job, and I’ll be extraneous to their decision really. It’ll be war and the army that leave their mark out here on me, not myself. I wanted to pick that first change, that first scar.” 

He could imagine it. The LT walking in there, and demanding a tattoo for no other reason than controlling exactly what would mark his skin first. The thought was not an indictment. The idea made something shiver red-hot in his belly, at the idea of the reason, now visibly marked on his skin that their LT would never let them go, never let them become one of the scars unmarked on skin, but bleeding below as long as he could help it.  
There was a shift now, a breath of air against his face in the darkness, risky enough just like this. “Have I misread this?” Nate murmured, close enough that only he could hear, giving him an out even know. Shut off from the meager bits of light of the camp, solid warmth on one side, it felt riskily, deceivingly alone. 

“No sir,” he breathed, hand sliding down to rest on the MOPP suit over where he knew the tattoo would be, his voice resolute and firm, drawing the LT in closer, knowing he had to make that final step, that Nate’s innate moral sense dictated that he should not do this. It was awkward in the dark, aware all the while of the camp around them, but the rough catch of chapped lips said more than words could, and the shiver that ran through them both re-affirmed that though this might wait, it wouldn’t disappear. “What does the tattoo say?” he asked.

Nate’s laugh is quiet against his mouth. “You’ll have to wait to find that out.”


End file.
